Art-Interview 2026 #2 with Vierra Queen

INTERVIEW ARTIST JEAN-PIERRE SERGENT "TEN QUESTIONS WITH VIERRA QUEEN", ART HISTORIAN, NEW YORK, OCTOBER 2026
[Note: THIS ARTICLE IS CURRENTLY BEING WRITTEN]

I'm Vierra Queen, an art historian, curator, and writer from Silver Spring, Maryland, just outside Washington, D.C. I grew up surrounded by art. My aunt and uncle are artists, and being so close to Washington meant I could hop on the Metro and visit the Smithsonian museums. Art was part of my life long before I understood all the different ways I could make a career out of it. I went on to earn my B.A. in Art History from Spelman College, with a double minor in Curatorial Studies and Public History. I'm now completing my master's in Art Business at Sotheby's Institute of Art in New York.

Over the past few years, I've worked across museums, galleries, auction houses, and artists' studios. From caring for collections at the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art to researching the art market at Artnet and working at Christie's and the Guggenheim, I've had the chance to experience art from several different perspectives. Maneuvering through these spaces has made me think more about how art is interpreted, presented, and valued, and how those things can change depending on who's looking. That's also why I enjoy speaking directly with artists. So much of my work has involved understanding what happens to art once it enters a collection, exhibition, or market. But there's an entire process that happens before any of that, and I think some of the most revealing conversations begin there.
Reading Influences, I kept coming back to your memories of copying images of animals as a child and your later encounter with the prehistoric drawings at Pech Merle. Those moments happened years apart, yet both seem to have found their way into how you work today. I found myself thinking about how much we carry with us from our earliest experiences with art. Toward the end of the text, you describe yourself as an "iconophile et iconophage," someone who loves images and devours them. After reading about the different places, people, and experiences that have influenced your work, that description stayed with me.

— V. Q.: When something catches your eye, whether it's an image, a memory, or an experience, what makes you want to incorporate it into your work?

—J.-P. S : I really hate thing to get lost, to be wasted, to get forgotten in the dustbin of history… For me, sharing everything beautiful I had the chance to encounter during my 'crazy' and rich life, every tiny thing which are alive, stunning, disturbing, beautiful or healing, seems to me so important that I need to share it, to draw it, to bear witness of it; in order to prove my belonging to Humanity as a whole. 
Not to impress others by my culture, but to be honest to myself ("Humain trop humain !" would have said Nietzsche). 


This is the gleaning process intricately entangled with its redistribution system through and thanks to the art process… If ever I eat and nourish myself, with something beautiful and stunning, as an image, a text quotation, a feeling, a sensation, a soul, a body, a sexual act, a glimpse on beauty, an energy, a spirit, a faint glimmer of hope or a life-force, somewhere in the world… then, at some point, it has to find its way out into my art or into my writings. 



The kind of images I use often—and almost always—reflect and corroborate experiences I've had and gone through… Could they be spiritual, physical, or just aesthetic. 


That is a curiosity urge with a voracious appetite and also an unmistakable necessity to share it, saying thus to the viewer: "look at that, it's just so beautiful, don't ever waist and forget that special moment in time and in history! That's so fragile, so special and will never happen ever again!" 



The encounter with an art piece that have been done thousand of years before me, or an object, a Mayan pottery or a tunic, a spell-like drawing done by someone who was thinking very differently that what I am thinking and knowing now; is giving me the chance to know more, to think differently, to live differently, to paint differently, to access some other levels of knowledge that we had totally lost nowadays… 
It's like embodying once again, the spirit of the priest, the Goddess, the shaman, the women weaver, or the Mother Kali, to embodies them truly and be part of the World again.

Not just in describing it passively, as most of the artists are doing today, as a recollection of their past life, but to be living it fully, living their different worlds, within my own artist life at a quintessential level! Again and again indefinitely… As in an eternal Cosmic Life Cycle. 

“Study the science of art and the art of science. Learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else." Teaches us so aptly Leonardo da Vinci (1452 - 1519)